There are people who can write eloquently about events of such significance. I am not one of them. I hope that doesn’t stand in the way of folks remembering the amazing accomplishment that the Apollo program was.

Frankly, it’s a bit of a disgrace that Congress funds, well, all sorts of things, over this element of our history, but that’s besides the point. Do I want to get angry, or do I want to see this data preserved? Yes to both.

That’s why I’ve given the project some money on Rockethub, and I urge you to do the same.

It’s difficult to properly memorialize this man, because, to a degree almost unheard of in our media-saturated times, he avoided the limelight. A statement by his family notes:

As much as Neil cherished his privacy, he always appreciated the expressions of good will from people around the world and from all walks of life.

EC has a certain fondness for privacy and for Apollo. If you do, too, please consider this suggestion made by Armstrong’s family:

For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.

We have to rely on nature to give us the microlensing events. That means we can’t actually pick and choose which stars to look at, and we can’t actually pick what times to look at. So the best suited telescopes are those telescopes we can use at anytime that are located throughout the globe so that it’s dark somewhere. And so we use a lot of amateurs, actually we don’t use, we work with a lot of amatuers who have their own telescopes, relatively small telescopes, .3 meters, .4 meters in their backyard which they can use anytime they want. We call them up when we see a microlensing event happening that we think might be interesting and we ask them to get data for us. In fact in many cases they’ve gotten crucial data for us which has helped to discover a micro-lensing event.

What’s most amazing to me is how useful it is to have small parts loosely coupled, each pursuing their own interests. What emerges is, quoting Gaudi again:

One of our amatuers, Jenny McCormick who works in New Zealand and has her own observatory which she calls Farm Cove Observatory has said “It just goes to show: you can go out there you can work full time, you can be a mother and you can still find planets.”